A Smorgasbord of Food Memories

Campus dining has changed a lot over the years

Story by Lynn Freehill-Maye | Photos courtesy of University Archives

Decades ago, the food at UB wasn’t much different from
army chow. Dinner meant meat, starch and canned vegetables, with a
gravy most nights. Sandwiches featured white bread, cold cuts and
iceberg lettuce. Then as now, the bulk of food was prepared at the
commissary, but back then it could only be described as
industrial—think beef tips and tuna noodle casserole.

Today, campus dining is more restaurant-grade than
military-grade. The Faculty Student Association still runs what
used to be called Food Service and is now called Campus Dining &
Shops (CDS), and its mission is larger than ever: serving 8,112
meal-plan-account holders this year, compared with the 1,100
students on board contracts in 1971. But the real differences are
in quality and variety, including healthier options. CDS chefs,
working in small batches as much as possible, turn out
Brazilian-style carved meat, vegetarian noodle bowls from the wok,
even the occasional stuffed lobster tail.

How did we get from Salisbury steak and Jell-O to Korean fried
tofu? It’s been a crazy journey, peppered with highs and
lows. Following are a few standouts from over the years.

Pot Roast with a Side of Protest

Campus dining in the age of activism

At UB, the college activism of the Vietnam era spilled over into
Food Service issues. In early 1974, for instance, student Gary
Storm (JD ’93, PhD ’82) launched a petition criticizing
the food at Governors Complex and calling Food Service
decision-making “divorced from the direct voice of the
students.” Signers complained about everything from the
quality to the quantity to the variety of food.

The lack of vegetarian options was a particular upset. The
Spectrum described Food Service officials struggling to wrap their
arms around what, exactly, vegetarianism entailed. “The
accommodations for vegetarians were barely even symbolic,”
Storm recalls. “For veggies, eggs were the primary protein.
No recipes with beans, nuts, tofu or cheese-without-meat were
introduced. Vegans, had there been any at that time, would have
starved.”

The next month, quantity flared up as the main issue when Food
Service tried dropping the traditional “seconds table,”
which had offered students an additional helping. Cliff Palefsky
(BA ’74), now a Bay Area civil rights attorney, then served
as the Student Association’s “student rights
coordinator.” When classmates alerted him they were going
hungry, he checked things out.

“You walked down the line and it was steam trays, some
vegetable. Quality of ingredients, nutrition—that was not an
issue,” he says. “It was whether there was enough. You
got one walk-through, and that was it. It was like, are you kidding
me? These are growing college students.”

The students took the matter public. “Hunger pain strikes
students,” a Spectrum headline blared. Palefsky alleged to
the paper that students often had to eat cold food or fill
themselves with bread or Jell-O. He wrote a letter calling the
situation “intolerable,” contacted a local attorney and
threatened a lawsuit.

Food Service took appeasement measures in short order, as he
remembers it. “They set up the seconds table—leftover
food from yesterday or whatever,” Palefsky recalls. “It
was like, ‘We’ll get you more food in a way that
doesn’t break the budget.’”

A Co-op Grows in North Buffalo

A group of eco-conscious students banded together in 1971 to
organize the North Buffalo Community Food Co-op. With a $3,000
university grant, they opened a nonprofit store on Main Street the
following year, offering produce, spices, nuts, grains and other
minimally packaged bulk goods.

Fast Times at UB

American fast food was in full swing in the ’70s, and UB
was no exception. The Bullpen, opened in 1978 in the Norton-Capen-
Talbert complex, offered cheeseburgers, quarter-pounders, fries,
shakes and hot pies. The Reporter called it
“McBullpen’s” for its faithfulness to a certain
fast-food chain. Responded Bullpen supervisor Maria Fronteria,
“My kids don’t want anything but
hamburgers—college kids aren’t any different.
It’s what they like!”

The Cola Wars

The so-called Pepsi-Coke “wars” raged through the
’80s as the university signed exclusive soda-fountain
contracts with Pepsi in 1982, then Coke in 1986. “The Pepsi
generation is over at UB,” the Reporter declared that year.
“The real thing is back.”

The ins and outs of the cola companies’ bidding wars (and
donations of big-ticket items like scoreboards to the university)
were breathlessly documented well into the ’90s, as the
campus’ soda contracts tended to change every four years.
Whether Coke or Pepsi, when the dining-hall fare tasted bland, soda
could be the proverbial spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go
down.

Snapshot: Wilkeson Pub

An ’80s-style pizza party

A steak dinner at Wilkeson Restaurant.

In the early ’80s, the campus boasted one of the hottest
restaurants and nightspots in town. Thanks to the downstate
provenance of the students who managed the place, Wilkeson Pub (in
the Wilkeson Quadrangle basement) was also one of few local joints
to serve New York-style pizza.

“The accents, the attitude, were all downstate,”
says Keith Curtachio (BA ’87), Campus Dining &
Shops’ IT coordinator, who started working there as a junior.
“To the point where if you ordered a hamburger, we would not
serve it to you with mustard.”

The pizza dough came from the commissary, but the cooks
stretched it out to get those super-thin slices and made their own
sauce. Come night, the pub morphed into a popular hangout. With the
’70s disco era not far gone, it retained the trappings of
that decade—a tri-level, underlit dance floor, a smoke
machine, a big sparkly disco ball. The venue kept a huge vinyl
collection with more than 4,000 records, and DJs spun on
weekends.

A student-run version of the “Gong Show.”

A week of activities at Wilkeson Pub.

Student-run “Gong Shows”—a takeoff on the
late-’70s-era national talent show—were held to
hilarious effect. At the time, local TV personality Randi Naughton
hosted a WGRZ-Channel 2 Friday late-night show called
“Randi’s Pajama Party,” which featured a cheesy
movie, then cut to Naughton giving funny commentary in PJ’s
on a brass bed. That bed was on occasion set up in Wilkeson Pub.
Naughton remembers giving away swag—and sampling the pizza.
“Back then I didn’t have to worry about
carbo-loading!” she says.

In 1985, New York’s minimum drinking age rose to 21,
forcing pub managers to get creative. Wilkeson Pub became Wilkeson
Restaurant, a full-service eatery with two take-out windows. On one
side they served Buffalo’s new Sweet Jenny’s ice cream;
the other side was transformed into a New York deli.

Once a month, Curtachio remembers, they sent a truck to Brooklyn
to collect Hebrew National products, along with pickles, knishes
and pallets of Dr. Brown’s soda. The new Wilkeson incarnation
made more money than ever, although not everything was a
hit—Cel-Ray, Dr. Brown’s bracing celery-flavored soda,
never sold, Curtachio says. Enterprising managers recycled it as a
soup base.

A few years later, Wilkeson Restaurant was relocated to Fargo
Quad and renamed the American Sports Grill, then Hubie’s, as
it continues to be known today.

A student-run version of “The Dating Game.”

Clamoring for Choice

How campus dining went from hunger fasts to an award-winning Hunger Games-themed dinner

By the early ’90s, as noted in a Reporter article from
1992, Food Service was working hard to change from its
“military image of yesteryear to a wider variety of entrees
that appeal to a greater number of people.” The
commissary’s scale remained massive, with giant soup vats,
massive spice jugs, huge mixers and dozens of staffers slicing
3,000 pounds of fresh produce daily. But Food Service was moving
toward where it is today, incorporating more feedback and variety.
Cooks worked from a bank of 1,817 recipes and asked for student
comments on the food.

That same year, 1992, Putnam’s food court opened in the
new Student Union. Its eight restaurants included Bagelicious for
New York-style bagels, TBG’s for Italian fare and
Señor Wok’s, which offered a then-exotic combo of
Asian and Mexican cuisine. Putnam’s was run by a Culinary
Institute of America graduate, to boot.

Today the Student Union’s food court is still around,
albeit with updated offerings like Jamba Juice, Moe’s
Southwestern Grill and Champa’s Sushi to feed modern tastes.
The stalwart Goodyear and Governors dining halls also continue to
serve students, but with fresh features, like a Mongolian grill at
Goodyear and crêpe stations on both campuses several days per
week.

Campus Dining & Shops’ current approach is to offer a
plethora of options, asserts head chef Neal Plazio, who came to UB
in 2013 after a dozen years running his own catering service.
“It’s the complete opposite of what you think of 30, 40
years ago, with huge pans and people glopping food on the
plate,” he says.

Most emblematic of the culinary turnaround is C3, the Crossroads
Culinary Center, which opened in 2012 with a splashy atrium,
showstopping open fireplace and seating for more than 600 on the
footprint of the old Red Jacket Quadrangle dining hall. It’s
an attractive space, but the venue’s real selling point is
its food. C3 offers 10 stations, from pasta to vegetarian to
wok-cooked entrées to desserts.

At a school with a significant population of students from
abroad, and American students with increasingly globalized palates,
international meals are now a matter of course. Indian chef Poonam
Matta, who joined the staff two years ago, has folded her recipes
into the regular meal rotation. A “Tour the World”
program offers a unique dinner twice per semester, featuring such
cuisines as Korean and Cuban. And a Global Market dining center has been proposed
for the North Campus’ academic spine within the next few
years.

Repasts Remembered

“The dental school was on Goodrich Street, virtually in
downtown Buffalo. Lorenzo’s restaurant in lower downtown was
great for a Sunday meal. We unscrewed the cheese shaker and poured
on the cheese for a generous serving of spaghetti. Another
desirable restaurant was Santora’s pizzeria. One could order
a giant 20-inch pizza and a pitcher of beer for $2.”

ALFRED FALCONE, MD ’50, DDS ’47

“I played football, so I ate on campus a lot. We could go
over to the Norton Union and load up. They had the big plastic
trays you would slide along cafeteria-style. You had ham, roast
beef sometimes, potatoes three or four different ways, gravy, big
dispensers for milk or iced tea, and desserts—ice cream,
cakes, pies.”

DON GILBERT, EDM ’69, EDB ’65

“We were eating simply—egg salad, tuna fish,
PB&J. The places we really liked to eat were on Bailey Avenue,
like Bocce’s Pizza and Bailo’s—they had the best
beef on weck, and a special dish, 21 Shrimp in the Glass. We used
to pull out the shrimp and count them. Another place we liked to
walk was Garden of Sweets—they had the best hot fudge sundae
I’ve ever had. I’ve still never been able to replicate
it.”

MARY FRANCES MARLIN, BS ’65

“They used to have these food carts in the different
buildings in between classes. Every Tuesday and Thursday in Capen
Hall I’d have a hot chocolate and an onion roll—kind of
like a kaiser roll with onions in it. That’s what I lived on.
Back then you went to the Rathskellar to get a burger and fries,
some chicken wings and beer. There was no healthy food in
Buffalo.”

RICK SCHRADER, BA ’78

1985. “Ox” wins the wing-eating contest!

“I didn’t like the food at all when I came as a
freshman. It wasn’t like my mother’s. Salisbury steak,
fried fish and tuna noodle casserole were always there. Now
it’s so much better. But we just kind of went with it. We
were pretty easygoing, I think.”

MARTHA MCILROY, EDM ’12, BA ’87

“On campus I had the food in Governors: overboiled pasta,
overcooked vegetables and a lot of grease. I can remember one or
two really awful attempts to cook Chinese food. They called it chop
suey, and it was pretty disastrous. A lot of us tried to escape.
There was always Duff’s. They had a $9.99 special—a
bucket of fries, a bucket of wings and a pitcher of Molson. That
was a very tempting deal for college students.”

MARK RUFF, BA ’91

“I’m not a vegetarian, but it’s always fun to
see the vegetarian stuff. They have sweet potato noodles with
cashew sauce—that’s one of my favorites. I like Indian,
Italian, Chinese—I can choose my own adventure every day. The
wings are good, too. When we see them on the menu we’re like,
‘We’re going to go to C3 and have wings
tonight.’”

Unconventional Dining

From bean dinners to themed dinners, UB has held a remarkable range of food events over the years

2015 “Hunger Games”-themed dinner at C3.

BEAN DINNER:
The Glee Club sponsored this modest repast in 1941, and at least
one other was held in 1946.

FAST FOR A WORLD HARVEST: Students participated in Oxfam America’s 1974 daylong
fast, limiting themselves to coffee, tea, fruit juice or broth, and
contributing the money they would have spent on food to projects
helping world farmers grow their own feed.

HUNGER GAMES DINNER:
CDS held a 2015 “Hunger Games”-themed dinner, based on
the blockbuster film and book series, at C3. Featuring rabbit stew,
Cornish hens and an archery contest, the dinner won an industry
silver medal for special events.

......................... Lynn Freehill-Maye is a freelance writer in Buffalo, N.Y.

No discussion of food on the main street campus and near campus
is complete without mentioning the fast food
place in the basement between Clement and Goodyear with great
shakes or ridge lea for brownies. And off campus-Parkside Candies
for ice cream .

Paul Rybarczyk

How could you have not included the famous "UB brownie"? it was
almost a daily part of my lunch. A 3" frosted square of
deliciousness, with a walnut half on top. I was there 1966-70.
Yogurt was a new thing...Bison Brand, 8 oz, I think for 25. That
combination was often a late day pick me up since I spent many
hours at school. As a fine art student, our studio classes were
three hours long.

Rich shapiro

We were the second class to live in governors. I remember the
food protests. The food was inexcusable. The salad was
chickery. I wasn't a picky eater. The food was beyond
terrible. There was no food served on the weekend the
only thing open was a sub shop. It was a low point in
buffalo. The good was they made great grilled cheese, roast
beef on weck in Norton Union. Off campus was wings
wings and more wings. Before the rest of the country found
it. Suprised roast beef on weck never followed suit

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